


Battered, But Never Broken

by cgf_kat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 05:39:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14586150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgf_kat/pseuds/cgf_kat
Summary: Navigating a relationship while living underground as freedom fighters in the human resistance isn't easy. In an alternate timeline where the Garrison Trio were Galra prisoners for months before being rescued, and Earth has been overtaken for two years, Pidge and Lance balance falling in love with dealing with the traumatic memories of their time as prisoners. Pidge POV.





	Battered, But Never Broken

“I don’t know...I don’t...it’s not there…”

The urgent mumbling wakes me from an uneasy sleep, and my eyes flicker open on the roughly-hewn stone ceiling of our man-made cave. The barracks and some of the other main rooms are done better, smoother ceilings...but this small room started out as storage, so I guess it didn’t really matter. I don’t mind though; the dips and patterns in the rock above me give me something to look at when I can’t sleep. 

“It’s not THERE! What do you want…!”

My cot squeaks under me as I turn toward the sound of the increasingly anguished whispering - Lance in the cot next to mine. Beyond him, Hunk is still snoring. 

Lance curls in on himself in his sleep, his features scrunching as if he’s in pain. “I can’t…” His breath catches. “I can’t...it’s not...stop…” He’s not in pain now - it’s only a memory - but he was then. “It’s not there,” he groans. 

I push my blanket away and swing my legs from the cot. His is so close, we’re so tight in here, that all I have to do is ease off mine onto my knees to be able to lean over him. 

“Lance...wake up.” I don’t grab him or shake him; that sets him off even more sometimes, which I learned the hard way a long time ago. I just brush his hair back and talk to him. “It’s okay. It’s a dream.” 

“It’s not there,” he whimpers. 

“I know. It’s not your fault.” And how many times did I have to tell him that when it was really happening? “Lance, it’s me, Katie. I’m here now; you’re safe.” 

As safe as we can be, anyway. If the Galra don’t find us down here...which is looking more and more likely every day. 

“Ka...Pidge…?”

“I’m right here.”

Lance’s eyes snap open, his head rearing back, but he sees me beside him and reaches clumsily for my hands as he blinks and tries to calm his breathing. 

“Ugh…” he groans. “Sorry, Pidge.”

“It’s okay.” I tilt my head at him. “I think it’s been longer this time.”

He takes a couple of deep breaths as he sits up, and glances over his shoulder to confirm that Hunk is still sleeping. I move to sit beside him, twining my arm with his and lacing our fingers together. He squeezes tight, like he always does, to ground himself to the reality outside the nightmare. 

“Yeah...I guess...but it still happens.”

“It still happens to me too sometimes,” I remind him. It’s hard not to have nightmares, when you have so many memories of listening helplessly from the next room while the guy you’re pretty sure you’re falling in love with screams. 

I still don’t know where Dad and Matt are, or what happened to them. All I have is my imagination in that department, and it can almost be worse sometimes. But I know what happened to Lance. I was there. Maybe we wouldn’t be together now if it hadn’t happened...but I would give him up in a heartbeat if he didn’t have to have those memories. 

Lance smirks now, and it might not be as wide or bright a smirk as I remember from the old days back at the Galaxy Garrison, but at least when he does it I know he’s still him. They didn’t break him. They may have our planet, but they don’t have our souls. 

“I guess even the sharpshooter and the tech genius can’t be perfect,” he says with a laugh. I just huff in mild amusement, because I’m too tired to have a witty response to that.

He shrugs and looks around our little room absently, which still is a storage room, but with space cleared at the back behind a wall of stacked crates. The space is just large enough for our three cots and one three-tiered makeshift shelf we all share to hold what few items of clothing and belongings we have. 

Most of the other former Garrison students, faculty and staff, other armed forces personnel, and the numerous civilians who live down here sleep in large rooms full of closely packed cots and pads on the floor. The three of us are no less packed in here, but at least we have a little more privacy. Commander Iverson had them clear this space for us after they finally managed to rescue us from the base the Galra set up in the Garrison. It’s been more than a year since then, but they’ve let us keep it. I guess they figure after being held by the Galra for months, we deserve it. 

I close my eyes for a moment to will away the flash of a scream in my memory, and I swallow.

Yeah. We definitely deserve it. At the very least, Lance does. 

“I am really getting tired of these caves,” Lance says.

“I know. You’ve only said that about a thousand and one times.”

“I’ll say it three thousand and one if I have to, but we’re not gonna be down here forever.” His expression hardens for a moment. “We won’t.” 

I tug him closer by our linked hands and plant a brief kiss on the first thing I can get at - his temple. He breaks a smile again and reaches across with his free hand to tug playfully at the braid that’s resting over my shoulder between us. When my hair grew back out, it was just easier to keep it that way than the ponytail I used to wear when I was younger. Decent scissors are hard to find down here, and I don’t have time to do much with my hair hair but it needs to stay out of the way. So, braid.

Lance tugs again, gently, and laughs a little. 

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. Sometimes I wonder how it would’ve gone if we’d met sooner, ya know? Like in grade school or something?”

“You were the one pulling ALL the girls’ braids, I’m sure,” I tease.

“Only for the purpose of flirting! I’m not an animal.”

I get up to go back to my own cot, and urge him to lie back down. “You should try to get back to sleep. You’re on the scouting run tomorrow.” 

My stomach twists at that, because I hate it when he has to go out there and put himself in even more danger, but we all have to do our part around here.

And Lance may still be kind of a goofball, but he really can shoot.

***

Everything went wrong the day we found the blue lion. The night before that the alien pod had crashed near the Garrison, carrying Shiro. We’d rescued him, run into Keith...we worked together to track the strange signal to the desert. 

But just as we pinpointed the cave the signal was coming from, several Galra fighters descended from the clouds. We didn’t know what they were then, but Shiro seemed to. Of course he did.

“What are those!” Hunk shouted.

“They’re from the aliens who had me!” Shiro answered. His eyes were wide with the same kind of fear I see sometimes in Lance’s eyes now. Like he was trapped, just for a moment, in a past he would rather forget. “They’re here! They’re after whatever this Voltron thing is. No, no...I thought we had more time…!”

“What do we do!” Lance asked.

“You three get down there to the cave, and follow that signal! Maybe whatever’s in there can help us,” Shiro said, motioning to me, Lance, and Hunk. “Keith and I will try and draw them away until you can find it.” Keith nodded in agreement, and they were off trying to get the attention of the fighters as we dashed down to the cave entrance. 

We did find it - the blue lion, anyway - and it showed us a vision of Voltron. We know about the other lions that are out there somewhere, and what they can do together, but lot of good that does us now. 

We still don’t know what happened to Shiro, or Keith. We never saw them again. But we do know what happened to the blue lion. The Galra have it in one of their other facilities near the Garrison, but it’s more fortified than anything on the planet. We could never get to it. They tried, the night they rescued us, but a lot of people died. 

The Galra followed us into that cave anyway, that day. Nearly two years ago now. Their fighters blasted the cave open before we could get into the lion, and troops swarmed in and cut us off from it. 

I don’t remember a lot of the details after that, from that first day or two. Maybe it was the shock of realizing aliens were not only real, but we’d been captured by them. I remember being on our knees, blasters at our heads. One of them was shouting at us. 

“The lion’s shield was down! Which one of you bonded with it! Which one!”

The strange blue hexagon-patterned force field had gone back up by then, but they must have seen that it was down when they burst it. It had disappeared when Lance knocked on it, and he was the one who’d said he was pretty sure the eyes were following him…

Lance. That was the answer they were looking for. But we all looked at each other and none of us said anything. Somehow we knew it wouldn’t go well for the one they were looking for. 

I remember something bashing me over the head as they kept yelling at us...one of them kicking Lance in the gut when he protested...a blaster butt to Hunk’s face. We weren’t saying anything and they weren’t happy. 

Everything went fuzzy and I don’t really remember the short trip up to their ship in orbit. They hadn’t set up a base yet, and we were there for the first few months, I guess. Maybe they moved us later to have Lance closer to the blue lion, or to consolidate operations as they settled into their occupation of Earth...I don’t know. But if they hadn’t we’d probably still be there.

When they left us alone the first time, I think we finally became the team we were supposed to have been all along, back at the Garrison. At first we were all freaking out, though. Hunk was hyperventilating, I was shaking and barely conscious and probably had a concussion, and Lance was shouting at the closed door.

“Let us out of here, or we’ll find our own way out! You hear me! You’ll be sorry!”

“Lance, stop yelling at a literal wall!” I think that’s what I said, anyway. My head hurt, and he wasn’t helping.

“Hey, it’s not brick, and it’s a door, thank you very much.”

“We’re on a spaceship!” Hunk was babbling. “We’re on a real spaceship, and we don’t even get to enjoy it because they’re probably gonna kill us!”

“Aren’t you freaking out?” Lance asked me.

“Of course I’m freaking out!” I was well aware, after witnessing what they were like, that my dad and brother could very well be dead already after all. That we could die. 

“We’re gonna die!” Hunk said again, as if echoing my thoughts. 

Lance spun on him. “Hunk! Buddy, I love you, and you’re probably even right, but saying that over and over is not gonna help anything! Least of all my sanity.”

“Neither is yelling at a wall!”

“DOOR!”

“What difference does it make!” I cut in. “It’s closed, and we’re prisoners in here!”

And then we all just stopped. We were yelling at each other, just like yesterday in the simulator, but it didn’t do any good then, and it was going to do even less good now. I think we all realized that at the same time, somehow. 

“Shiro escaped…” Lance said eventually. “Maybe we can?”

I swallowed. “M-maybe…”

“But...I think if we’re ever gonna do that, we can’t...be fighting. You know?” Hunk added.

Lance nodded. “We have to trust each other…”

It was quiet for a while, until I made a decision and cleared my throat. “Then...there’s something you guys should know….” And I told them who I really was. 

“Wait, really? You’re a girl…?”

Lance was the one who was a little more in shock over that one at the time. Hunk just kind of went ‘huh’ and that was that. 

“But...you’re not mad?” 

“Why would we be mad?” Hunk asked. “Wait, so that picture I found is you and your brother?”

“Yeah…”

Lance was still staring at me. “You’re a girl?”

Hunk shook his head. “Ignore him. He’ll be fine when he’s done processing.”

The Galra found out Lance was the one the lion had tried to bond with because he told them. Idiot. But why he did it...no, he’s not an idiot. I just think it sometimes to ease the pain of reliving that day. 

We’d been on the Galra ship for almost a week, stuffed into that one cell and left there with almost no food and not much more water. They burst in, periodically, to keep us from really getting any sleep, to yell some more and smack us around and demand we tell them what they wanted to know. One day, I guess...Lance had enough. 

It was crazy how strong these tall cat-like aliens were. One of them had just basically thrown Hunk halfway across the small room and into a wall. Another was coming after me with something that was sparking, and there was already blood seeping down into my eye from a cut just over it. Things were starting to spin. 

Lance had been on the floor trying to get his breath but then he was...there. In front of me. Protecting me with his body, holding his hands up as if to ward them off. 

“Stop it! Leave them alone; it was me, okay! The lion tried to connect with me. Now stop hurting my friends!” It worked. They all stopped and stared at him. 

“Lance…!” I whispered. “Don’t—” But he ignored me, and he kept talking...and I think that’s when I started to fall for him. That was when I knew there was more to him than the cocky, goofy exterior he wore. 

“And-and I mean I don’t even know if it really worked. Like, it was looking at me, and it lowered it’s shield thing when I knocked on it, and it kinda felt like it was trying to reach out to me in my head, but then you guys showed up and all that went away and I haven’t felt anything since. Okay? That’s all there is. Just leave my friends alone! Okay?”

He repeated that there was nothing there anymore. No connection that he knew of. It hadn’t solidified, or something. But they took him anyway. They grabbed him by the arms and dragged him from the cell, kicking and protesting the entire way. 

“Wait!” I was shouting too, but Hunk was unconscious on the floor by the wall. He didn’t know what had happened. I had to tell him later, when he woke up and Lance was gone. “He said it’s not there! What are you doing! Where are you taking him!”

They shoved me back. I lost my balance because I was still dizzy. I landed on my back and by the time I could see straight again, enough to sit up, they were long since gone. 

It didn’t take long to find out that either they hadn’t gone far, or they were pumping the audio from where they took him in here on purpose, to mess with us. I mean either way I was sure it was to mess with us, and Lance told me later that it was actually a couple of corridors away when we were on the ship, so now I know it was purposeful...but it wasn’t literally next door until they moved us back to the surface of the planet, to the Garrison campus that they’d fortified and upgraded with their own technology. 

One moment everything outside the door was muffled and moving farther away and then, suddenly, it was clear. 

“ - what do you want from me? That’s all I know! I don’t know anything else about this Voltron, or that lion or - wh-what is this thing? What are you doing?” 

Lance. I didn’t know where. But I could hear him. 

A Galra voice. “The lions bond with a paladin of their choosing. If the lion opened its force field for you, it has chosen you. The connection may not be strong yet, but it is there...and you will use it to activate the lion for us, so we can use its active signature to either scan for or attract the other lions.”

“What? What are you talking about? There’s no connection! And I wouldn’t help you if there was, so you might as well get me off this weird thing right now. These purple cuff things better not burn my jacket! I mean they only feel a little bit warm, I’m just saying—”

“You will help us, no matter how long it takes...whether willingly, or not. If not willingly, perhaps your distress will provoke the blue lion into action.”

“Excuse me?”

No…

Then the crackling sound started, and Lance started screaming.

I was the one uselessly yelling at a closed door that day.

***

The blue lion never responded. Never activated. Sometimes I hate it for not answering. I know the universe could very well be doomed right now if it had, and maybe that’s why it didn’t...but Lance suffered because it didn’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive it for that. 

It’s difficult to explain how everything went after the day Lance told them the truth, and none of us really likes to remember the details anyway. The part that matters is we took care of each other. All three of us. We tried to escape more than once - of course we did - but it never worked. And because Lance did what he did at the beginning, the times we were caught attempting escape were the only times the Galra ever laid a hand on me or Hunk again. 

I don’t know when the shift happened, between me and Lance. Hunk and I took turns keeping an eye on him when they brought him back, because it was hard. He was usually unconscious at first, and sometimes he wasn’t breathing well for hours after. It scared the crap out of both of us. But one day I was helping him sit up, after he’d recovered a little, and he leaned closer and kissed my cheek.

When he did it I felt a nice shiver up my spine and I suddenly wanted to cry all at the same time. I knew I was falling for him...and I was afraid we were both going to die. So why waste time? I guess that’s what I thought. So I turned my head and caught his lips. 

Hunk giggled at us from across the cell and we both told him to shut up together, but we were smiling.

***

I know it didn’t go well the moment the scouting party comes through the back entrance. As soon as I see Lance and the way his shoulders are slumped. 

Then I count them. Five instead of seven, and no one else has come in. Iverson goes to their leader for a debrief, and I run to Lance. He buries his face in the space between my neck and my shoulder and holds onto me, maybe a little too tight.

“They’re closer,” he says near my ear. “There’s more of them around the lion hangar than ever before, and installations closer to us…”

We’ve been looking for another way to get to the blue lion since the relative massacre the night they got me, Lance, Hunk and quite few other prisoners out of the Garrison Galra base. 

I curse quietly. Lance lets out a breath and pulls back enough to look at me. “Do you ever think they know exactly where we are, and they’re just toying with us? Because they know we want to get Blue away from them?”

“I hope not…” But he could easily be right. “You okay?” Lance just shrugs.

Iverson nods at us as he passes with Lance’s team leader. By the time they rescued us, my hair had grown out and standard Galra prisoner garb didn’t leave much to the imagination anyway. Iverson took one look at me when they got us back here, and knew who I was. It was a weird night. 

“Katie,” he said. Like he wasn’t even surprised.

“Yeah. And?”

And I was expecting to be chewed out for disguising myself to get into the Garrison, but I didn’t get a word of that. Instead he did the strangest thing. He hugged me. I was confused until he told me everybody had thought I was dead. Including my mother. But then he dragged me to one of the large open barracks rooms - the one for civilians - and she was there. 

“We got her out of your neighborhood before it was overrun, months ago.”

I didn’t hate Iverson anymore after that. It was hard to hate him when, after months of being held by aliens and knowing my planet was being taken over by them, one of the first things I got to do after being rescued was collapse in my mom’s arms. It didn’t matter that we were hiding for our lives underground; we were both sobbing and we didn’t care. 

Lance waves a data stick in front of me, bringing me back to the present. “We did get plenty of new scans for you and your team though.” 

I take the stick. “Thanks; we’ll get right on these.” There has to be something. Some way to get out of this...to get our planet back…

Lance is looking back toward the entrance, like he’s looking back at the two good men who didn’t come home today. The area around us has all but cleared out now. We’re alone. 

“Lance, really; are you all right…?”

“Not...really,” he sighs. “Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision, not letting Blue come after us before.”

I blink. “What?”

He winces. “I know...I never told you. I didn’t want you and Hunk to know anything you could get in more trouble for knowing when the Galra had us, and then I just...anyway. I don’t know.”

“What are you saying?”

He hesitates. “I mean...at first, there was nothing. I didn’t think we’d really connected. Like, she tried, but it didn’t have time to work. But it did, I guess. Sort of. I felt her a couple of times, eventually. After…” He looks away, going distant like he does when he remembers the parts he doesn’t want to remember. “After...really long days, you know. Like she started to wake up and I knew she wanted to come after me, but I knew what they’d do if she did. We’d all have been kind of screwed. So...I-I told her to go back to sleep.”

I want to grab him, hold him tight, but I’m too stunned to move. “Y-you...Lance…”

“But maybe if I hadn’t we could have busted up their base before they got enough scans, or something, and everything would have been fine.”

“N-no, there were too many Galra on Earth by then; it never would have worked without an outside attack before she activated, to be sure they couldn’t scan or were too distracted to, or something…” I manage quietly. That’s been the backbone of our plan all along. To build enough reconnaissance. To know enough weak points to execute an attack like that, and then get Lance to the lion. If we can ever do it.

“I know,” he sighs. “But...I just wonder.”

I’m opening my mouth, trying to figure out something else to say, when Hunk dashes in. “Lance! You’re okay! I heard about the scouting trip going badly, and I came as fast as I could…”

Lance grins as he looks up at his best friend. “Hey! Yeah...it sucked. We don’t need to talk about that, do we? Come on, game room?”

Hunk shrugs. “Sure!”

Hunk cares about the people we lost, too. He always does. But he has his place in keeping Lance balanced, and I have mine. It’s a rhythm we fell into long ago. Our way of protecting him. 

Except now, knowing he protected us even more than we thought he had, I begin to think maybe he was always going to be just fine. Because he’s Lance. And that’s one reason why I love him. He may not think he is, and his strength may not play itself out in a stereotypical way...but he’s one of the strongest people I know. 

Lance glances back at me as he heads off with Hunk, as if to ask if I mind, and I smile to let him know it’s fine. But at the last moment I catch his hand, pulling him back. He emits a tiny yelp of surprise, but it turns into a satisfied hum when I tug his head down and press my lips to his. Maybe a little aggressively, to be honest...

“Hel-lo,” he answers coyly, when the kiss ends. 

“Shut up and go play your games.” They’re all board games and card games, because we ration power down here, but that’s never stopped us. 

Instead of going, his arms slip around my waist. “You want to come?” he asks.

“I’m gonna get started on this data; maybe next time. I’ll see you later.” I kiss his nose, because he hates that. He yelps and swats at me, letting me go in the process. 

He goes with Hunk, but he comes back to our room earlier than usual, just after I’ve managed to pull myself away from the computer lab. Well. Not managed. We reached the end of our power ration for the day; I didn’t have a choice but to leave. 

Lance makes a beeline for me before I can say anything and leans over me, kissing me.

“Hunk said he’d hang out in the game room for a while longer,” he says, before I can ask. 

I smile and pull him down beside me. 

***

We wake in a tangle of blankets on the floor, with the tunnels shaking around us and the attack alarms going off. We’re up in an instant, our training kicking in, pulling our boots on as we stumble out into the corridor. 

“I knew it!” Lance shouts. “They were playing us!”

We hear snippets of conversation as we run to our posts.

“...attacking the Galra…”

“...backing us up?”

“...giant flying castle…!”

“...lion…!”

“What are they saying?” I ask.

Before we can get to where we’re supposed to be - Lance with the pilots, me with the tech team - we run into Iverson and Hunk in the corridor. 

“You three, with me!” Iverson says. “You need to see this.”

He takes us to one of the side entrances, which twists and turns up, and up, and opens onto an outcropping in the side of the mountain. To a passive onlooker, if they saw the opening at all, it would look like nothing more than a natural cave opening, because it is. Our living quarters have just been connected to it. 

An overhang protects, but we can see the battle in the sky over what used to be the Garrison in the distance. Only a few fighters, really, have come after us. Most of them have been held back by a fleet of what also looks like Galra fighters, but the color of their glow is off. A little brighter. Like they’ve been reprogrammed. Their flight patterns are different, too, like they’re not being flown by sentries or Galra soldiers.

And there, above the Garrison, is a ship different from anything else I’ve ever seen. It isn’t Galra. It isn’t dark and purple. It’s bright gray, with blue glowing running lights, and it does kind of look like a castle. The altered Galra fighters swarm around it, emanating from it, like it’s their home base. There are other smaller ships that aren’t Galra, too, aiding the fight, and our own ships are mustering to help.

“What is going on?” Hunk asks. 

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Iverson says. “But look.” He points out a speck and hands Lance a pair of binoculars. 

Lance holds the magnifying lenses up just for a moment, squints, and then he practically drops them. I catch them before they can hit the ground. 

“Lance!” I bark. 

“That’s...it’s a lion!” he says. “A red one, just like Blue!”

“What?” I gasp. “I press the binoculars to my own eyes. It takes me a moment to find the swift-moving point in the battle, but when I do the air goes out of me. It IS the red lion. The one we saw as part of Voltron when Blue showed us that vision two years ago. 

And just after I focus on it, it heads right toward us. “Incoming!” I cry. 

Hunk snatches the binoculars, but he only needs them for a second before the red lion is close enough to see clearly anyway. This time Iverson catches the binoculars when Hunk drops them, and we’re all backing up into the rock face. It’s like the lion knows we’re here. The ledge we’re on is large enough for it to land, and when it does it drops its mouth to the ground like the blue lion did for us what seems like forever ago. 

I don’t know what I’m expecting to happen. I don’t think I’m expecting the two people who hurry down the ramp in red and black armor, respectively, but at the same time I’m not surprised. 

“Keith!” Lance says. 

Iverson is slack-jawed with us. “Shiro?”

“Wh-what the heck!” Hunk cries.

“We’ll have time to explain later!” Shiro calls, as they rush over to us. He looks at me, Lance and Hunk. “Right now we need you three.”

“U-us?” Hunk asks.

“We have the green and yellow lions,” Keith says, “but they’re dormant, and the black lion can’t be freed from it’s hangar in the castle until we have the other four. We’ve got to get the blue lion out of here and get everyone back to the castle. You know about Voltron, right? The blue lion showed you?”

I stammer. “Y-yeah, but…”

“I think the Galra are distracted enough,” Lance says wryly. 

“How are you here!” Iverson says. “Where’d that blasted lion come from?”

“The Galra had found it,” Keith answers.

Shiro sighs, and directs the answer mostly at the other three of us. “After the Galra found the rest of you that day...we had no way of freeing you. I’m sorry. Not with two of us and no weapons. We stowed away on a transport up to one of their ships looking for a way to get to you, but the one we ended up on left orbit and then we were...out there.”

Keith shrugged. “Shiro’s memories from being a prisoner helped us stay undetected. We heard chatter they had found the red lion, but it was dormant, and we hopped ships until we came across it. I was able to bond with it, and it took us to the castle. And Allura and Coran.” He points over his shoulder back at the ship that seems to be leading the attack on the Galra installation in the Garrison. “We found Green and Yellow and towed them on board, and Blue is here.”

“Now we just need their paladins,” Shiro smiles. “You three.” 

“Us?” Hunk repeats. “I’m not a pilot! I don’t know how to fly anything!”

“You will. And that’s all we have time for right now. We need to go.” Shiro casts a look at Iverson and smiles. “We can talk later. I owe you something for strapping me to that table.”

Iverson blinks his one good eye in surprise, but then he’s laughing as we all run into the red lion and up to the cockpit. Lance holds onto me as the takeoff send us all stumbling. 

“Geez, mullet, smooth it out a little, would ya?”

“Talk to me after after you’ve flown your own lion in the middle of a battle,” Keith snaps back.

“Fine, but really, you guys couldn’t have come back sooner?”

“Actually I’m kind of with him on that one…” Hunk trails.

Keith huffs. “Excuse me if it took a while to build a coalition with one working lion!”

“All right, knock it off!” Shiro groans. 

I’m giggling, and it feels good. We’re squeezed into this cockpit and but it just feels...right. Like the family Hunk, and Lance and I have made of ourselves was always supposed to include these two. 

A voice comes over the radio, startling me. “Shiro, you’d better have my sister!”

The air goes out of me, and I don’t know my knees have started to go out until Lance catches me around the waist. “Matt?”

A screen pops up off to the side of the consoles...Matt. A little older, hair longer, with a scar across one cheek...but it’s my brother. My vision blurs with tears almost instantly. “Matt!”

“Hey, Pidge…” He trails off. I think he’s choking up too, but he’s smiling. “Hang tight, little sister. I’ll see you when this is over.”

“You’re alive!” I am trying really hard not to cry in front of five guys, but I don’t think it’s working. Lance is still holding onto me, and I think Shiro’s hand is on my shoulder. “What about…?”

“We haven’t found Dad yet, but we will,” Matt says firmly. “He’s out there. I know it.” He looks away, distracted by something off screen. “I gotta go. I love you.”

“Love you too…”

It’s a good thing it takes a few minutes to get to the lion hangar past the Galra base at the Garrison, because for a good solid two minutes after that I’m laugh-crying into Lance’s chest because I can’t really decide how to feel. 

And it isn’t just Lance who’s there for me. Shiro’s hand stays on my shoulder. Hunk pulls us into as much of a group hug as he can in the tight space, and even Keith asks a couple times over his shoulder if I’m all right.

Matt is alive, and here, and I have a whole other family, too. This one. My mom is safe for now back at our base...I have Lance...and I know there’s still a battle ahead and a giant robot to form and a planet to take back, but somehow I know we’re going to be fine. 

Lance leans down to kiss my cheek as we draw close to where the blue lion is, because he’s going to have to go. 

“Is this real?” I ask.

“I really hope so,” he laughs. 

A new voice, over the radio, female and accented. “Keith, are you in position over the blue lion? Our fleet has taken out enough of the Galra infrastructure here; they won’t be able to take enough scans. You’re safe to deploy the blue paladin.”

Below us the hangar is crumbling, blown open by the coalition forces, revealing the blue lion and a nearly clear area around it. 

“Lance,” Shiro says. “We’ll drop you down there. Get inside, and as soon as you’ve got the hang of it, follow us up to the castle so we can activate the other lions. Got it?”

“All over it,” Lance grins. “But I don’t think you’ll have to drop me.” He’s looking off, as if he’s somewhere else, and below us Blue is already waking, as if she can sense Lance. She drops her barrier with a roar and shoots into the air, coming straight for us. 

“Well would you look at that…” Keith mumbles. Shiro just smiles, and Hunk and I exchange a not-exactly-surprised glance. Hunk is more surprised than I am. 

“Go down to the bottom hatch,” Shiro says, chucking a thumb over his shoulder. I follow Lance down, and the doors in Red’s belly open as Blue fies up under us with an open mouth.

Lance gathers me up in his arms one more time and kisses me, and it’s a little dramatic - probably on purpose on his part. It’s like the playful side of him that’s been somewhat dampened the last two years is suddenly coming back with a vengeance, and...I thought it would annoy me. It doesn’t. Not now. It feels good when he spins me around and sets me back down.

“Catch you later, little lady.”

“Don’t get cocky.”

“Who’s cocky? We’re only about to save the planet.”

I give his shoulder a shove. “Get going, sharpshooter.”

My Lance. The boy who refused to be broken. He drops into the air with a whoop and Blue scoops him up, and I know no matter how happy he is right now, that there will still be night when he wakes up breathless. There will still be nights when I do, too. 

But together, we can get through anything. 

Shiro’s voice fills the radio waves as I race back up to the cockpit. A screen has already popped up off to the side - Lance in blue’s cockpit, and I haven’t seen a grin that wide since the Garrison. 

“Back to the castle, Lance!” Shiro reminds him. “It’s time to form Voltron.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'd love to hear what you think, and I will try to respond to any comments! :)


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